True Believers(16)

“What we want to know,” he said carefully, “is how they’re going to handle this funeral. Is it going to be just a funeral, or is it going to be a platform?”

“I know,” Fred said. “I went looking for, you know, a bulletin, but I didn’t find one. There was one for next Sunday, but it was all about the loaves and the fishes.”

“It wouldn’t be in the bulletin. Did you hear anybody talking about the funeral?”

“Nobody was talking at all. Oh, except the pastor, you know that guy—”

“Dan Burdock.”

“Right. But he wasn’t where I could hear him. He was up in the choir loft, and I didn’t think I ought to go there. It was just him and this one other guy.”

“All right.”

“It’s strange in there, though. It’s like a Catholic church. And it smelled funny. I got sort of queasy. Are we going to go over there today and picket?”

“I don’t know.”

“He was gay, that guy who died. His guy friend—whatever you call it—he was there in the church when I went over, kneeling on those kneeler things. So we wouldn’t be making a mistake, you know, if we got the signs and went.”

“He didn’t die of AIDS.”

“Do we really know that?” Fred asked judiciously. “Don’t they try to lie about it, and put other stuff in the paper to keep it quiet? You know, died of cancer—but they don’t say the cancer was caused by AIDS.”

“In this case, it wasn’t AIDS. It was cocaine. Have you ever taken cocaine?”

Fred blinked. “I’ve never done anything worse than drink a few too many beers, except maybe one time I had some boilermakers. They’ve got whiskey in them. Not that I don’t know what a curse drink can be, Pastor Phipps. I know that. But it’s not cocaine.”

“Quite.” Fred reminded him of his brothers, that was the trouble. Rock stupid and worse. Roy got up and went back to the window. St. Stephen’s was quiet, as usual. St. Anselm’s was doing its usual traffic in homeless people.

“All right,” he said. “This is what we do. We do not picket. Not today. We send somebody to attend the funeral. Is Didi Billings going to be around today?”

“She’s due to come in and do some typing at nine.”

“Good. We can make her pass, if we have to. Send her in to me as soon as she gets here. We may have to send somebody downtown to buy her a dress. The funeral’s at noon. We should have a decent amount of time to get her ready. I don’t want her to be obvious.”

“What’s she going to do?”

“Listen,” Roy said. “I want to know if Dan Burdock pulls anything. I want to know if he makes some kind of issue out of Scott Boardman’s homosexuality. And then I want the rest of us ready. We won’t picket at the church, but if we have to, we’ll picket at the cemetery. And if we do, I want the media there. Can you arrange that?”

“Yeah,” Fred said.

“Good.” It was true, too. Roy had taught Fred himself, and it wasn’t that hard, getting news reporters where you wanted them to go, as long as you weren’t competing with a major airline disaster. Roy looked up the street and down it again. Everything was quiet.

Back in his freshman year in college, when he and Dan Burdock had been roommates, Roy had known nothing at all about homosexuality, or about God, either. He had only known that he was untouchable, and that his untouchableness came from a whirling vortex of trivialities he could never quite understand. The way he dressed, the way he spoke, the fact that his ambition was so thoroughly single-minded and so thoroughly ruthless—he had changed his dress and his speech, but the ambition was with him still. He would always remember himself his first night at the YMCA, that summer when he’d come north to earn some money before the start of school. That room, with central heat and a slick linoleum floor, with a bathroom down the hall with running water and a real shower. It had shocked him into speechlessness to realize that down-and-outs in New Jersey expected to have more in the way of amenities than coal miners and sharecroppers in most of West Virginia, and that people in the North believed that there was no one, anywhere, who still had to go out in the cold in the middle of the winter to use a chemical latrine.

It was 1962, and on the streets the girls wore skirts so short they looked like bathing suits, in colors so bright they shone even when there wasn’t any sun. On campus once the school year had started, the Princeton boys wore polo shirts and penny loafers they wore until they had to be held together with masking tape. Roy went back and forth from his classroom to his bedroom to the library, over and over again, and only on the outside did he begin to change. www.godhatesfags.com